The dummy variable is basically an instruction of how to sum. For the example on the left, “n” is the dummy variable.

“a” is the starting point

“b” is the end point

and “f(n)” is the function you want to sum over.

What does this all mean?

Well, basically:

That’s it! Notice how “a” is the starting point and “b” is the end point?

Let’s take a look at some examples:

For the third example, note that “x” is the dummy variable and not y.

Now, what happens if you are walking along a beautiful path on a bright sunny day when suddenly a burly man pulls out a butterfly knife with a pearl-embedded, elephant tusk handle and put it against your throat. Adrenaline rushes through your veins as your limbs go numb with fear while your eyes watch the empty space ahead, futile in making sense of your awaiting doom. With a deep croak, your adversary spat

“We meet again. Now let’s talk.”

He pulls out a slip of paper. The paper cried as it flapped against the wind.

“Take a look. Take a close look at this. Explain.”

The slip of paper makes it’s way to inches from your face. Close up, you piece together the various symbols on the paper and break out in cold sweat. On the paper, largely printed, you saw:

Now what the hell is that “infinity” symbol doing there? Julian your master failed to cover this in his lectures, and you know you are doomed, for you don’t know what it means.

You don’t want to end up in the situation above do you? So listen up!

The infinity symbol up there means that you sum to infinity. You don’t stop summing, you just add and add and add and add…….. You are adding an infinite number of terms.

You don’t stop!

You might be asking now, wouldn’t the sum diverge to infinity? In other words:

Well the answer is: Yes, most of the time. MOST of the time.

You see, for some sums, it doesn’t approach infinity. For instance, you can proof that

Try it on your calculator! Or… research on Infinite Geometric Progressions… or not.

When it comes to infinite sums, there can be some quite unexpected results. For instance:

And yes, the π is indeed the one we are familiar with ( π=3.1415…)

To learn more about it, you can research on the Basel Problem, or the Riemann Zeta Function.

There are other types of summations, such as cyclic sum, symmetric sum and sum-over-n-that-satisfies-some-conditions (I’m don’t know the actual name for this type of sum, hopefully somebody can help fill me up on that). Anyway, I’m not going to go through those sums cause I’m lazy. Let’s move on to ∏ (product):

∏ is essentially the same as ∑, just that instead of summing, you multiply!

Now let’s take a look at random examples:

For the second example, note that “n” is the dummy variable and not “x”.

Similar to infinite sums, there are also infinite products, where you multiply FOREVER! HAHAHA!

Now, what happens if you are walking along a beautiful path on a bright sunny day when suddenly a burly man pulls out a butterfly knife with a pearl-embedded, elephant tusk handle and put it against your throat. Adrenaline rushes through your veins as your limbs go numb with fear while your eyes watch the empty space ahead, futile in making sense of your awaiting doom. With a deep croak, your adversary spat

“We meet again. Now let’s talk.”

He pulls out a slip of paper. The paper cried as it flapped against the wind.

“Take a look. Take a close look at this. Tell me. Tell me the exact value.”

The slip of paper makes it’s way to inches from your face. Close up, you piece together the various symbols on the paper and break out in cold sweat. On the paper, largely printed, you saw:

You faint like a Victorian lady, for you do not know.

Well, for this case, I’ll probably let you die, because I’m too lazy to give you a solution to the above problem. (Also because I’m not sure (Also because I don’t know)). However, I can give you the answer though:

Basically, my point is, just like an infinite sum, an infinite product can also yield interesting results.

Challenge: Using the above result regarding the infinite product, proof that:

If the LHS and the RHS exists. Hence, proof that:

First part of the challenge question can be solved with Sec 4 syllabus while the second part involves A-level syllabus. However, the second part is easier as compared to the first.

I hope that now you know what ∏ and ∑ means! Just don’t go around doing stuff like this:

So I just ended my mid-year exams (or MYEs as we like to call them) today and I have decided to start blogging once more! Yes, from now on I’ll be posting (or rather will be trying my best to post) regularly. Well in intervals of once a fortnight! (for those who have absolutely no idea as to what a fortnight is, it’s basically 2 weeks).

“Why is this post called Accountability?”

Yes I hear you dear reader.

So recently (while I was on my mega blogging hiatus) I have been doing a bunch of stuff. One of these things is, you guessed it, WATCHING YOUTUBE VIDEOS!!!

So while I was watching YouTube videos, I stumbled upon this channel called College Info Geek . He’s a dude called Thomas Frank and he makes these videos about productivity and study tips. There’s a video on his channel about how he was able to wake up at 6am every day:

So what I’m doing is basically what he’s doing just that I’m using the system with a couple of modifications.

So what am I going to actually do?

First, I’m posting this post which is basically a commitment. Every person who reads my blog will now expect me to post something 2 weeks later. And if I do end up not posting anything for 2 weeks, people gonna be angry.

So what if people are like:

Then won’t I just end up slacking off?

Welcome to part 2 of the system.

I made a deal with my friend. So if he sees that I don’t post anything for 2 week, I’ll buy him a drink and after 3 weeks I buy him a meal. It basically escalates to the point where I owe him a Starbucks drink if I don’t post for 5 weeks.

So yeah, accountability.

Well I actually have quite a lot of topics to discuss. Like I said I have been doing a lot of stuff while I wasn’t blogging.

From meeting Nobel laureates to playing piano and even watching anime.

Lots of anime.

Expect a lot more in the future. The next post will probably be something about black holes since it has been quite a while since I last did something on that topic.